an affair with a married surgeon. During a trip, the doctor finds a kidney-shaped stone and takes it back to her office to use as a paperweight. The stone begins appearing in a moment in the woman's life and she begins to think it has supernatural abilities; however, it always returns to the same position in her office when she comes in each morning. She decides to get rid of it by throwing it far into the ocean, but it still returns to her desk. When Junpei finishes writing the story, he calls Kirie to share it with her but he is unable to get through to her. He nonetheless submits it for publication and it gets accepted in a major literary journal. Months go by before he hears her voice on a taxi radio; it is at their point he learns that she owns a business of high-rise building window washers and her passion is tightrope walking between high-rise buildings without a lifeline. He also learns that she has been in Germany the past few months performing her craft. Despite not being able to speak to her again, he is inspired to write more than ever before and decides that she was influential enough to be “number two,” but starts to doubt the meaningfulness of his father's theory. The woman doctor story ends with the stone disappearing from her desk. This story shares several similarities with Murakami's earlier story “Honey Pie.” "A Shinagawa Monkey" Mizuki forgets her name when she is asked what it is by others. Her surname is Ando, the name she took after marrying her husband, but still uses her maiden name Ozawa professionally. After reading about a counseling center established for residents of the Shinagawa ward in the newspaper, she decides to book and attend a session in hopes of getting to the root of her worry. There, she meets Mrs. Tetsuko Sakaki who is open to listening to her story. Mizuki tells about her upbringing in Nagoya and how she moved to Yokohama to go to college. In subsequent sessions, Mrs. Sakaki asks her to tell her an event relating to names. Mizuki tells her the story about how her classmate Yuko Matsunaka came to her to talk shortly she committed suicide; she talked about jealousy and asked her to keep her “dorm name tag” for her so that it would not be stolen.